Defocus (the holy grail that the iPhone has been trying relentlessly to emulate after – the shallow depth of field)
[You may try the auto feature but I find it hit or miss and the manual is definitely much better, if not perfect]

Vignette (an oval shaped spotlight effect, with a subtle dark frame around the person(s), on your chosen area of focus)

Before iPhone 8 can do more amazing photography miracles, there are simple and inexpensive tools out there that will empower your already neat iPhone like those cool DSLR lenses. Above is what I got a few months ago and in this holiday season I am gonna use it to have a lot of fun. Here is a sample the iPhone took with it. Read More

This is probably the best thing coming out of Hong Kong in a long while, since my teenage years of fascination with Cantonese pop songs.

This little devices holds a sim card and connects to an iPhone and thus enables that iPhone to call/text from two numbers. This isn’t new for many Android-based smartphones in China (as many Chinese have two or more numbers), but it is a first for the Apple fans. The trick is I ordered from Kickstarter last August and only received it over the last few days. So far it works great, and will probably save a lot of hassle when I next go to China (with my local number) by not having to carry a backup iPhone and having to charge two phones every day.

Not only powering a secondary phone number, this device also serves as an alarm for those who are afraid to lose their iPhone, nowadays the indispensable connection to their digital life. Chances are you would carry this credit card-sized gadget in your pocket or purse, if you leave a meeting or meal forgetting about your iPhone, when you walk a few steps away and the devices loses touch with the iPhone, its alarm goes off. See below for the demonstration:

Oh, there’s also a button on this thing that you can remote control your iPhone’s camera, but you need to open up the PIECE app on your iPhone first to use that function.

If you are interested in this product, you can visit their site. (This is not a paid post.)

It’s that time of the year again that Chinese send out their New Year’s wishes to family and friends, and nowadays also to those social friends which could number in the hundreds.

I tried something somewhat professional looking yet not painfully complicated, thanks to the Internet. Here below are the two versions of the 2016 Chinese New Year’s greeting card from the Zhao/Cao family, featuring a selfie photo from a beach in Cancun, Mexico in late November last year. The reason why I am showing two versions is that when I AirDropped the first version, which looks pretty good on my MacBook Pro’s screen, to my iPhone, it looked terribly dark and you cannot see our faces at all. Then after a few tricks in Photoshop, I finally made a version that looks acceptable on the phone. Here are the differences below:

The smartphone acceptable version, which is much brighter and it shows on a computer screen.

The computer-friendly version, which looks totally dark on a smartphone screen

Feel free to try to look at these on different displays and most importantly, 猴年大吉大利！Happy New Year of the Monkey!